Monthly Archives: February 2015

There’s nothing like coining a new word to get your story into print. Many are the press releases I see where a neologistic angle has been taken as a way of grabbing headlines. Few are the ones that get any traction.

So well done to estate agency Savills, which managed to get quite widespread coverage for its findings about the increasing numbers of people who are living in houses worth a million pounds or more, but who don’t necessarily think of themselves as millionaires. According to Savills, they are ‘Homillionaires’.

I think a round of headlines is as far as this new word will travel. It’s a pretty ugly creation, and doesn’t really work at all in spoken format, which is a clear negative when it comes to widespread adoption. And while there is certainly a semantic gap for the term to squeeze into, property millionaires as a term probably covers it adequately enough.

That’s not to say that the word will completely disappear. I can see newspapers referencing it in other pieces about property prices this year, but always with inverted commas around it to confirm that it hasn’t really established itself. It’s a term whose future is probably purely for journalists and sub-editors.